I sent Peter a link to my blog and he replied. We've exchanged emails. I then asked permission to post his original message to see what kind of feedback it gets here. Peter has just given permission so here is his letter.

Hi Larry,

Thanks for notifying me of this. It is a worthwhile discussion you're having, but I still don't agree with you.

You say there's plenty of evidence there is something wrong with Ross's science, but you fail to say what that evidence is. Indeed, what you're really saying is that there's something wrong with him - that is, with his belief.

This might be, but it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with his science or his understanding of science. You say doctoral students must understand basic concepts and ideas and think on their feet and defend their ideas etc. Where is the evidence that Ross failed to do so? I assume he did exactly that in his oral exam.

It seems that you want nothing less than Ross's assent to an old Earth theory, which is, of course, a matter of belief, not understanding. And rather than launching into a discussion of epistemic conditions for belief, let me just say that I, for example, understand intelligent design theory quite well I think, and yet I don't believe a word of it.

And one need not be a postmodern relativist or a fundamentalist Christian (which, I've argued for a long time, amount to the same thing) to refuse to accept that that scientific theories are literally true - if by true we mean correspondent with reality. There are, after all, pragmatist philosophies of science that suggest scientific theories are "true" in so far as they work, but that they aren't true in the sense most people give to that term. I assume you reject these philosophies of science, but surely you wouldn't deny a student a doctorate because he doesn't subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth.

Look, I think Ross is dishonest, but I don't know that for a fact. For all I know, maybe he really is a radical relativist, who believes science and religion present two incommensurable paradigms. But either way, he's doing enormous damage to his religion, and it was the point of my column to make that case.

6 comments:

If Ross were to state or argue that the best efforts of science were insufficient to support an old earth as a scientific conclusion, then I would agree that he must lack understanding of the evidence and/or be unwilling to be convinced by any amount of evidence due to his religious beliefs. (This seems to me to be how virtually all YEC's think.) If he believes in a young earth as a scientific conclusion, he had best be prepared to defend that conclusion during his exams against all of the evidence to the contrary. If he couldn't do so adequately to his committee's satisfaction, then they certainly should deny him a Ph.D.

On the other hand, if he believes in a young earth as a religious or philosophical position only, accepting the scientific conclusion of an old earth as the correct one based on observable evidence, then it becomes difficult to deny him his degree. Perhaps he just feels that his religion provides a higher form of truth than what science does. You and I might both agree that he would be very wrong on that score, but it doesn't change that it is a philosophical disagreement we would have with him and not a scientific one.

Generally, I agree with McKnight here. I would want to have seen some evidence during his candidacy that would allow me to tell which of those situations apply to him before concluding that he did not deserve his doctorate, in spite of my belief that he was basically scamming the system to get a degree. My guess is that either his committee dropped the ball and didn't probe the question of his beliefs (perhaps being afraid of lawsuits) or they did and just concluded that he is a 'radical relativist' as McKnight calls it.

I have stated my opinion on this many times, so it is probably no surprise that I agree with jasontd.

That doesn't mean I agree with McKnight though. In the same manner that we should not let religion make special pleas, we should not let pragmatists or postmodernists make them. A YEC compartmentalist will not make a good and truthful scientist, and a 0EC (no Earth age) compartmentalist philosopher won't make one either. It is best for all if they are culled early.

It also seems McKnight may misunderstand the evidence and believes it is a theory. Dating procedures of rocks makes their age pretty solid observations, since there are few assumptions involved in verified models of observed radioactivity. A few procedures are even selfcalibrating, efficiently removing most assumptions.

It is analogous to that I have a theory that I have a mother that was old enough to birth me at the time, but I have data that tells me her and mine current age.

I think McKnight is right on the money. Seems like you are turning science into a kind of religion with the sort of "loyalty oaths" I hear scientists asking for with respect to Ross's case.

What is so unusual about a guy being able (and willing) to operate in two different areas? If he can do the work and show his mastery of the material within the framework of science he deserves a PhD. If he has some odd personal views in addition to that, so what? (Doesn't everyone?) Don't become the thought police. Science stands up pretty well without that being necessary.

Perhaps it would be worth discussing the issue with some of your colleagues in the philosophy department.

"...in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." -- W V O Quine

On the other hand, if he believes in a young earth as a religious or philosophical position onlyA proposition about the empirically accessible, physical world cannot be "a philosphical position only". That's a totally incoherent, self-contradictory concept. Which in turn renders your argument incoherent.

P.S. for trinifar: Quine's extreme version of sceptical empiricism has little support among contemporary philosophers and zero among scientists. I don't think it any longer deserves to be taken seriously as a philosophy of science, if it ever did. Quine cannot escape some measure of guilt, in my opinion, for the later intellectual sins of postmodernism, no matter how unsympathetic he would have been to the pomos themselves.

For all I know, maybe he really is a radical relativist, who believes science and religion present two incommensurable paradigms.

Unless Ross is different from almost every other YEC I've ever encountered (since I first read talk.origins in 1990), I am very skeptical that he is a radical relativist (except perhaps as an occasional rhetorical refuge). Nor do I find it likely that he would go for the NOMA-style compatibilism of "incommensurable paradigms". The ICR/AiG types claim that they are, in fact, doing science AND that their science is superior to ours AND that it just happens to historicize their favorite myth cycle. YECs firmly assert that natural science took a wrong turn sometime around 1800, and has been going down the wrong road ever since.

The whole "alternate paradigm" trope (also marketed as "different worldviews", "different assumptions", "seeing through Biblical glasses" etc.) is really an attempt to explain just how the majority of the world's smart and educated scientists can have been that badly wrong for the last two centuries. As I have encountered it, it is one or both of:

1) The Low Road: A naked accusation of bigotry and narrow-mindedness against the "evolutionist" scientists.

2) The High Road: A conceptual appeal to something those who didn't sleep through high school geometry (ie. all the engineers and science lovers in the audience) will remember: that the theorems you derive depend on the axioms you start with. Just as you can diddle one or more of Euclid's Postulates and derive a different (but still internally consistent) system, you can shift between "uniformitarian/old earth/evolutionist" and "catastrophist/young earth/creationist" assumptions and interpret the data validly in each way. (This is however inconsistent with the claim that YEC is the TRVTH, and in practice the rhetorical High Road tends to devolve into the Low Road).

Recent Comments

Principles of Biochemistry 5th edition

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Superstition

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerlyseemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.

Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.

The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.

The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.